Month: January 2010

Images of the Week: Xenakis’s Architectural Scores

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

These two drawings by Iannis Xenakis are currently on show at the Drawing Center in Manhattan as part of the exhibit Composer, Architect, Visionary. The top one is “Study for Terretektorh” (c. 1965-1966), the bottom “Study for Metastaseis” (c. 1953). Both are parts of graphic scores that characterize the abstract, percussive, maximalist, highly demanding (for both musician and listener) work that Xenakis created up until his death in 2001.

There’s been something of a surge in interest in graphic notation of musical composition in recent years, notably in the Every Sound You Can Imagine exhibit, first staged at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (October 2 – December 7, 2008) and later, in expanded form, at the now sadly defunct New Langton Arts in San Fransisco (February 5 – March 28, 2009), as well as the show Between Thought and Sound at the Kitchen in Manhattan (September 7, 2007- October 20, 2007). All these shows, like the Xenakis one, focus on the non-traditional strains of compositional visuals that flourished in the mid to late 20th century, and the arrival of the 21st.

There’s numerous other illustrations at drawingcenter.org, as well as videos that show how the images correlate with the sound of the particular pieces, among them these two: youtube.com, youtube.com.

The beauty of these videos is how clear and precise that correlation is — how what seems visually cacophonous and wildly extrapolation on paper proves to be fairly Newtonian in terms of the direct relation between image and sound, vector and continuity, density and volume, and so forth.

The show just opened on Thursday, January 14, and it is open through April 8, with a variety of talks and performances occurring throughout that run.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • RIP, Dannie Flesher (age 58), Wax Trax Records (Ministry, Underworld, Meat Beat, KMFDM) cofounder, industrial patron: http://is.gd/6fWsB #
  • ♫ Afternoon audio-stream: Gill Arno's eerily still field-recording soundwork courtesy of @soundwalk: http://is.gd/6dCH5 #
  • Darn good (and long) list of artists/inventors who work at the intersection of art and science: http://is.gd/6a52r (from andshakers.com) #
  • Noticed in last night's flashbacky episode of Fringe that "clairaudience" wasn't originally in show's opening-credits extrasensory litany. #
  • Morning sounds: no dogs, no cars, no planes, no birds, the rare bus, the neighbor's laundry, the siren hum of the hard drive. #
  • Off to Fillmore, 2nd concert of 2010: Cake, whose John McCrea wrote great sound-minded lyrics for Kinky's "Headphonist" http://is.gd/5ZcVc #
  • I miss the live cams of the Finnish-Russian border crossings. They all seem to have long since gone dead. #

Quotes of the Week: Machover, Banalaties, Suspicion

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The MIT Media Lab legend and early music-technology figure Tod Machover contributed a rangy essay at nytimes.com this week. After a brief autobiography, he talks about the relative democratization of music technology, and then about an opera he’s been at work on. In the process, he expresses his own concerns about the pace of progress and the potential negative influences of technology:

“Musical technology is so ever-present in our culture, and we are all so very aware of it, that techno-clichés and techno-banalities are never far away and have become ever more difficult to identify and root out. It is deceptively challenging these days to apply technology to music in ways that explode our imaginations, deepen our personal insights, shake us out of boring routine and accepted belief, and pull us ever closer to one another.”

And yet, as is so often the case online, the comments are riddled with enmity. One commenter writes, in full,

“One more marketing guru talking about ‘The Future Of Music’. What’s the name of his iPhone application we must buy to be considered cool hipsters?”

Another:

“This man is obviously desperate for big-figure grants.”

The culture war isn’t an entirely contemporary affair, either; writes a third,

“As far as music technology and pop music is concerned, you can directly trace the collapse of songwriting to the explosion of studio technology in the ’70’s.”

Another commenter goes all ad hominem, attacking not Machover’s ideas or his expression of those ideas, but his

“unbridled egotism and hubris.”

While the comments (55 as of this writing) aren’t necessary reading — nor are all of them negative — they do lend context to Machover’s article. Even for all the populist success of his efforts over recent decades — as he notes, Guitar Hero and Rock Band resulted from ideas explored in classes he has taught — the mesh of music and technology (more broadly, of art and technology) remains a potent source of suspicion.

Full piece at nytimes.com.

Recorded Voice -> Historical Experimental Audio (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

One of the best Resonance FM podcast series is focused, as its name puts it in an admirably straightforward way, on the Voice on Record. The series, hosted by Sean Williams, shares various audio examples that emphasize human speech.

In the past, this has involved everything from children’s records to the landing of man on the moon to early modern poets. The November 17, 2009, episode of Voice on Record, just posted online earlier this week, focuses on the sound of the voice in experimental music and sound art (MP3). Among the pieces heard is work by Luciano Berio. In between examples, Williams discusses the origins of this sort of music in not only technological advances, but in the culture of experimental radio. The segment, the 12th in the Voice on Record series, is titled “The Voice in Musique Concrète and Electronic Music.”

[audio:http://podcasts.resonancefm.com/podpress_trac/web/3130/0/VoiceOnRecord12-Nov17th2009.mp3|titles=”Voice on Record 12″|artists=Sean Williams (host)]

Full details at resonancefm.com. More on Voice on Record‘s Williams and this specific segment of the series at sbkw.net.

Not a whole lot of vocal music gets covered on Disquiet.com, for reasons that have somewhat eluded me, though came into mental focus when I read the following recently in Martha Mockus’s book Sounding Out (Routledge, 2008), a critical overview of the work of Pauline Oliveros, the avant-accordionist and deep thinker about improvisation and listening. This is Oliveros speaking, as quoted in Sounding Out:

“I figured out a practical use for the overtone series. As you know tones consist of not one but many overtones. If you listen carefully you can hear them. The tone quality of any instrument depends on the prominence of these overtones. For example, the sound of the flute, the octave overtone is most prominent but not the higher overtones. On the clarinet the octave but mainly the 12th is prominent and etc. The human voice though has the most complex overtone series.”

Much of contemporary experimental music, especially experimental electronic music, is focused on the transformation of individual sonic elements. There’s something about the human voice that is so dense with tone, so complex, that it can overshadow everything around it. When the human voice is one of those elements subject to transformation, often the composition, the instrumental composition, becomes a background — becomes secondary — to the vocal. The exception, of course, is when the meaning of what is sung or spoken is itself ignored — or, more to the point, rendered secondary — in favor of tone and texture. And that is the sort of vocal music that ends up getting covered here.

In any case, this Voice on Record segment is a good introduction to early experiments in using tape delay and extended vocal techniques to transform the human voice.

Classical Music -> Turntablist Hip-Hop (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Class distinctions and cultural assumptions aside, classical music isn’t foreign to hip-hop. Violins are a common emotional cue for producers, and enough hip-hop hits — from Coolio to Nas to the Beastie Boys, just to name a few — have sampled classical music to register it a common if not everyday occurrence. Hip-hop is often symphonic, built on over-sized emotions, dramatic syncopation, and room-filling sound. But DJ Rob Swift makes the connection literal on his forthcoming album, The Architect, due out February 23 on Ipecac (the record label run in part by Mike Patton, patron of noise and benefactor of sonic irritants).

Swift is a veteran turntablist, best known as a member of the ace ensemble called X-Ecutioners, who were to turntablism what the Mills Brothers were to vocalizing and the Harlem Globetrotters are to basketball: showoffs turned showmen who make crowd-pleasing entertainment out of incredible choreographed feats. (More recently he’s recorded as part of the trio Ill Insanity, with DJs Total Eclipse and Precision.) For The Architect, Swift is pretty much on his lonesome, and he has reportedly focused on classic-music samples for the entire album. That’s certainly evident in the one track made available thus far, “Raida – 2nd Movement,” which opens with beats that could date from a Run-DMC single, before the source material slowly makes itself clear during a richly orchestrated and melodramatic fade (MP3).

[audio:http://www.girlieaction.com/music/rob_swift/downloads/Rabia%20-%202nd%20Movement.mp3|titles=”Rabia – 2nd Movement”|artists=DJ Rob Swift]

There’s a video for the track on youtube.com, showing Swift walking through Manhattan and up the stairs to the great second-story record shop Fat Beats.

More on Swift at djrobswift.com and ipecac.com.